Latest / The Cloud Business Podcast with Fexingo: AWS, Azure, GCP, and Enterprise Infrastructure / Cloud Contracts Are Now Charging for DNS Query Volume
Transcript
- Lucas: If these conversations are useful for what you're building or running, you've probably noticed that cloud providers have gotten very creative about what they charge for. Luna: You mean beyond compute and storage? They're finding new line items. Lucas: Exactly. And the latest one I'm seeing in enterprise contract renewals is DNS query volume. Providers that used to bundle DNS into the base cost are now metering it per million queries. Luna: Huh. DNS—the thing that translates domain names to IP addresses. That's everywhere in modern architecture. Lucas: That's the point. Every microservice call, every container startup, every API handshake generates a DNS query. And when you're running hundreds or thousands of services, those queries add up fast. Luna: So it's not just about the cost of the DNS infrastructure itself—it's about charging you for the traffic pattern that your architecture creates. Lucas: Right. And if this episode is useful for your planning, the way we keep these episodes ad-free is through listener support at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: It's a small way to keep this kind of specific, no-fluff analysis going. Lucas: Okay, so let's get into the numbers. I looked at a real case from a mid-sized SaaS company—about 200 microservices, moderate traffic. They renewed their contract with AWS in April, and their Route 53 line item went from essentially zero to four thousand two hundred dollars per month. Luna: That's a jump. Was it purely from metering DNS queries? Lucas: Yes. Previously, DNS was bundled into their support plan or the compute commitment. The new contract explicitly charges per million queries. Their architecture was doing about 150 million queries per month—mostly internal service discovery, health checks, and API calls. Luna: And they didn't catch that in the contract review? Lucas: Their finance team focused on the big line items—compute, storage, data egress. DNS was buried in a pricing appendix. And because it's a per-million charge, it doesn't look scary until you multiply by your actual volume. Luna: So what does a typical per-million rate look like? Is it uniform across providers? Lucas: Not at all. AWS Route 53 standard queries are about forty cents per million for the first billion queries. Azure DNS is around thirty cents per million. GCP is similar, around thirty-five cents. But the tricky part is that these are tiered—the more you use, the cheaper it gets. However, if you're a mid-market company, you're not hitting the top tier. Luna: So a company doing 200 million queries per month at forty cents per million would be paying eighty bucks? That doesn't explain four thousand dollars. Lucas: Good catch. The devil is in the type of queries. Internal DNS queries for private hosted zones are often charged at a higher rate—I've seen up to two dollars per million. Plus, some providers charge for the hosted zone itself, per zone per month. If you're running hundreds of zones for different environments, that adds up. Luna: So the actual cost can vary dramatically depending on architecture. Is this a way for cloud providers to monetize the complexity they encouraged? Lucas: That's the cynic's view. The provider's perspective is that DNS infrastructure has real costs—it needs to be fast, redundant, and globally available. But for many years, it was a loss leader to get you into the ecosystem. Now they're trying to make it profit-neutral or better. Luna: And because DNS is so foundational, you can't just rip it out easily. You'd have to rearchitect service discovery, maybe use a third-party provider like Cloudflare or Akamai. Lucas: Right. But some companies are doing exactly that. I spoke with a CTO who migrated their internal DNS to Cloudflare for about half the cost. But that introduces latency and complexity—you have to manage a separate DNS infrastructure, and for time-sensitive queries, even a few milliseconds matter. Luna: So it's not a slam dunk. What about negotiation? Can you cap the DNS cost in the contract? Lucas: Yes, and that's the actionable takeaway. Before you sign a renewal, ask for a DNS rate ceiling. Get the per-million rate locked, and ask for a volume discount that kicks in earlier than their standard tiers. Also, audit your current DNS traffic—most companies don't know their query volume because it was never billed. Luna: That's smart. And you can also look at reducing unnecessary queries. Like caching DNS responses more aggressively, or consolidating hosted zones. Lucas: Exactly. One company I worked with cut their query volume by 40 percent just by adding longer TTLs to internal records and removing duplicate zones. That's a direct cost saving. Luna: So the lesson is: don't assume DNS is free, even if it was in your last contract. It's a new attack vector on your cloud budget. Lucas: And it's spreading. I've heard Azure is piloting similar metering in their DNS private resolver service, and GCP is expected to follow. This isn't a one-off—it's a trend. The cloud providers are looking for every egress point and metering it. Luna: I guess the era of 'included' is ending. Everything is a line item. Lucas: That's the business of cloud. But if you go into your next renewal knowing your DNS numbers and having a rate negotiation strategy, you can keep it from becoming a surprise cost. Luna: And maybe even use it as a lever to get lower rates on other services. Lucas: Absolutely. Trade-offs are everywhere. Thanks for listening—next time we'll look at how cloud contracts are starting to charge for API call volumes, which is another hidden cost that's emerging.